MIMI IS MOLTING

November 15, 2008by: jovial_cynic

On weekends, I like to let my chickens out of their pen and roam around in my back yard. I would do it on weekdays, but I'm at work during the daylight hours, and by the time I get home, the birds are already in their coops resting.

This morning, after spending 45 minutes under my house, I went to let my birds out and saw this:

I thought that my chicken was sick, so I quickly ran inside to do some research. Broken feathers and the such are sometimes caused by mites, which weaken the feathers and cause them to break. However, because this was only happening to one of my chickens, I decided to rule that out and dug a little deeper until I learned that this is what molting looks like. Just to be sure, I typed in "molting chickens" into google's image search and found this blog post with the following image:

So yeah. As weird as it looks, this is perfectly normal. And chickens apparently don't have a specific schedule for when they molt, which is why my other chicken isn't going through the same thing right now.

Why does anything get a disease? Incidentally, what you see in these photos is NOT a disease. The chickens are molting, which simply means that they're shedding their feathers and getting new ones.May 27, 2010

Tara said:
Thanks for the great pictures. I think our girls are about to go through their first molt. It was Nov. for yours but it's only Aug. here in the SE USA. Hmm. Thanks again.August 16, 2010